A series of potentially abortive ova recovered from fertile women prior to the first missed menstrual period

Abstract

Over a period of ten years, twenty-eight early conceptuses have been found in a group of 136 potentially pregnant women of known fertility who submitted to hysterectomy for a variety of therapeutic reasons. Twelve of these early human ova were abnormal and of these seven were certainly destined to abort. Four of the latter might not even have caused clinical evidence of pregnancy because of their extreme abnormality.The ova destined to abort, either with or without evidence of their ability to produce clinical pregnancy, showed such fundamental defects as multinucleated blastomeres, absence of embryonic disc and/or chorionic cavity, or profound hypoplasia of the future placental tissue. None of these patients in whom abnormal ova were found showed any clinical or pathological evidence that maternal environment per se played any part in the production of the abnormal ovum. In other words, the endometrium was normal in all cases. The evidence, such as it is, indicates that the defective fertilized ovum is due to intrinsic “ “germ plasm” quality rather than to its environment and is the main factor in the production of spontaneous abortion.